Peak seasons: Are you fully prepared for this golden opportunity?

Every year businesses from all over the region, roll up their sleeves and craft their utmost competitive strategies and biggest offers. Whether it’s Ramadan, Eid, all colours of Friday Sale (White/Yellow/Black), Cyber Mondays, etc lucrative opportunities are being continuously capitalised by regional retailers. But one question stands still: is your company fully prepared to handle a higher volume of demands?

Many businesses suffer from abandoned online carts, frustrated consumers, unexpected system downtime and unwanted fraudsters during the peak moments. That’s why having the right tools is vital, as many acquirers face difficulties when handling a higher load of transactions, and developers delay implementing solutions to not disrupt the shopping journey.

Make it easy to pay

A convenient, reliable, unified online and in-store shopping journey became the expected not the exception. A survey found 41% respondents prefer to shop both online and in-store during the peak season. So, services such as click-and-collect, digital wallets and in-store refund can add a great value to the shoppers’ journey. It’s also essential to make it easier to pay by providing their preferred payment methods – such as Mada for Saudi shoppers, Visa/MasterCard for UAE, AliPay/Wechat Pay for Chinese shoppers.

Make it impossible for fraudsters

Don’t let fraudsters disguised as genuine shoppers drain your revenue, as 26% of the retailers we surveyed recently admitted to facing fraud attempts or data leaks during peak seasons. The easiest and most effective way to block fraudsters is to have payments set up with a built-in risk management solution to monitor transactions immediately and recognise the genuine from the fraudulent.

After all, retailers want to welcome genuine shoppers during the peak time as well as protect their own business. Good fraud management should be multi-layered and consist of both proactive (i.e., risk engine, machine learning, authentication) and reactive (i.e., anomaly monitoring, chargeback management) elements to effectively regulate and eliminate any theft possibilities.

Make meaningful decisions with unified data

As peak seasons bring a higher volume of online transactions, in-store footfall and a significant volume of data it becomes essential to have a unified system to gather all this data and connect the dots between different channels. Data driven insights can have a powerful impact, it helps in understanding customer preference to personalise upcoming offers, examine every channel’s performance and predict cash follow. You can also provide a frictionless loyalty programme, getting rid of the traditional loyalty card and app by building a customer recognition system.

Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy, leaning on their favourite retailers to provide an intuitive hassle-free shopping journey. Colliding with the right tools and partnering with the right payment processor can help businesses navigate every peak season.

By Sander Maertens, Head of Middle East at Adyen